Session Variable Manipulation in Answers

Recently I worked on a project that used Non-System Session variables for some of the reports. While on the project I learned a nice trick on how to modify value of these variables in Answers to perform testing without having to jump out to a dashboard.

In this sample Answers report I'm using a Non-System Session variable called ReportDate to calculate the employees most recent department and compensation for head count purposes.
The report below shows the head count and compensation numbers as of May 31, 2010 since that is what I defaulted the session variable to in the initialization block.

Now I can modify the value of the ReportDate session variable by clicking on the "Advanced" tab at the top and then scrolling down to the "Prefix" portion of the page. Within the "Prefix" box I can enter the following syntax to change the date to January 1, 2009: SET VARIABLE ReportDate='01/01/2009';



Here is the new screen shot of the report showing the break out of employees for January 1, 2009.


If you need to modify multiple Non System Session Variable values simply delimit them with a comma like so...SET VARIABLE ReportDate='01/01/2009', SessionVariable2='Something', SessionVariable3='SomethingElse';